YARTSEV RECEIVES DONALD B. LINDSLEY PRIZE IN BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE
SAN DIEGO — The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) has awarded the Donald B. Lindsley Prize to Michael Yartsev, PhD, of Princeton University. Supported by The Grass Foundation, the prize recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis in the area of general behavioral neuroscience. The award, which includes $2,500, was established in 1979 in honor of Donald B. Lindsley, PhD, who was an early trustee of The Grass Foundation. The prize was presented during Neuroscience 2013, SfN’s annual meeting and the world’s largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
"The society is pleased to honor Dr. Yartsev's innovative research helping to advance our understanding of how spatial information is processed in the brain," said Larry Swanson, PhD, president of SfN. "He has already made landmark contributions to the field of behavioral neuroscience and it is clear he has a great scientific career ahead of him."
Yartsev, who earned his PhD at the Weizmann Institute, used electrophysiological recordings to investigate the areas of the brain involved in the processing of spatial information from the external environment. While most of the work in this area of research is done in rodent models, Yartsev was able to record cellular activity in bats navigating a two-dimensional environment. Building off of this research, Yartsev then developed a technique to record from bats flying in a three-dimensional environment. His efforts led to the first-ever recordings of single neurons from a freely flying animal and will likely serve to inform scientists’ understanding of two- versus three-dimensional spatial representation in the brain and spatial memory in the brains of mammals.
Yartsev is currently a CV Starr Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University.
The Society for Neuroscience is an organization of nearly 42,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.
